“Grief is telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief is trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”
In the murky middle of 2020 - the year we all lost someone or something dear - writer, feminist, mother, and advocate Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born September 15, 1977) lost her father unexpectedly. He died an ocean apart from his daughter during COVID-19, and the lack of a body and the loss of connection devastated her. Adichie responded by writing her grief, because that is what writers do.
Adichie's Notes on Grief are a form of grief observation, a phrase coined by C. S. Lewis in his A Grief Observed which changed the way we talk about grief, and the self in grief. Both accounts, separated by almost seventy years, are frank and deliberate, vacillating between detached intellectualising and the raw, throbbing velocity of a whirlwind world that looks the same but with the colossal absence of the person we love:
I have mourned in the past, but only now have I touched grief's core. Only now do I learn, while feeling for its porous edges, that there is no way through. I am in the centre of this churning, and I have become a maker of boxes, and inside their unbending walls I cage my thoughts.
From this situ, a widening gyre of pain, Adichie captures the physicality of grief, as it ousts her body from its comfort of what's known: "Grief is not gauzy; it is substantial, oppressive, a thing opaque. The weight is the heaviest in the morning."
Why are my sides so sore and achy? It's from crying, I'm told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is: my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth; on my chest, a heavy, awful weight; and inside my body, a sensation of eternal dissolving. My heart - my actual physical heart, nothing figurative here - is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body, of aches and lagging strength. Flesh, muscles, organs are all compromised. No physical position is comfortable.
Lewis noted acutely: "I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief." Adiche echoes this double-layered grief as well, being inside and outside the emotion simultaneously, which affects how we carry ourselves around those who are grieving. Adiche kept very close company after her father's death because of this heightened self-awareness, avoiding the "smug certainties of a person yet unacquainted with grief."
In 2001 - another year of grand scale loss - Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh wrote about anger and advised a return to self as a response to anger. Which is sage advice and yet in grief it fails us. There is no self in grief, our construction of what we were depended on the existence of this other loved one, and without that, who are we? The stabilising force that keeps us still and solid is affected, so if we sit with our anger, we fall and collapse in. The grieved versions of normal emotions are so much more vast, so much more traumatic.
My anger scares me, my fear scares me, and somewhere in there is shame, too – why am I so enraged and so scared? I am afraid of going to bed and of waking up; afraid of tomorrow and of all the tomorrows after. I am filled with disbelieving astonishment that the mailman comes as usual and that people are inviting me to speak somewhere and that regular news alerts appear on my phone screen. How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?
The journey, a place of grief, like memory, like hope - a physicality of being in which we both wrap and suffocate ourselves. A tunnel, a gyre, which for me is a great expansive sky with a heaven-verging desert, with no distance ever gained no matter how fast or forward we walk.
The exceptional factor of Adichie's account is not her ability to sit in the pain, or put words to her outsized feelings. It is this enlightenment: grief has a remainder other than pain and that is love. One of my favorite poems is Philip Larkin's "Arundel Tomb" which is a several-stanza eulogy for a couple now entombed (read full poem here.) Larkin walks us through their memory and life, and notes at the end "What will survive of us is love." The body is gone, the face - the sensory intake that we come to trust and assume - is all gone. But love remains. Adichie writes tenderly, emphatically:
I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father's daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.
The love that floats around us, saturates the air, lifts our chins to the spectral infinite. The love that marrows our bones and oxygenates our lungs. That love bonded us to this individual in the first place, our love survives their departure. Our love remains. Read more on the pain, the survival and the substance of fear, anger, loss and love in a rumination on our unknowable real mortality; a pondering of post-death location; and Christopher Hitchens's brutal reckoning with his mortal limitations.
